So you’re gonna Ramsey it up and be a Culinarian, ey? Get your inventory space ready!

Before you begin…

Where is the Culinarian Guild? How to become a Culinarian?You can become a Culinarian by visiting the Culinarians’ Guild in Limsa. If you have at least L10 in any combat class – you’re good to start cookin’!

Updating your Cooking Gear is quite important if you’re going to be crafting your own leve items. We have a Crafting Gear Guide to help you out on that.

[1]Single Submit Leves: Levemete & submission are just a short walk from each other.

[C]ourier Leves: Levemete is from the [H]ometown, to be submitted to the [L]ocal Levemete.

[RC] or Reverse Courier Leves are from the [L]ocal, submitted to [H]ometown.

[R]epeatable Leves.

Notes:

[1]Single and[3]Repeatable Leves (1 each) are from the [H]ometown, and [L]ocal levemete.

[C]ourier leves will always give the Highest EXP per craft, but require a lot of time and travel costs.

[3]Repeatable leves will always give the Highest EXP per Leve. If you value your leves a lot or don’t have many left, these are good. But, they are MORE expensive. We will recommend the best [1] and [3] levequest(s) for every tier. Note that this depends on server prices and might not apply to you (Unlikely). We will comment on every tiers [C] levequest but will likely never recommend it. Use [C] levequests at your own discretion!

A Precursor item means it requires a fully crafted item AS A MATERIAL.

These dailies are best used to push past “bad tiers”, or simply on your highest level non 50 crafter. I suppose you can also use them on crafting classes which are lagging behind for one reason or the other.

If you’re super fresh and have all low level crafters, and happen to unlock it early – you CAN do them now. While I don’t recommend it, I suppose it’s better than them just disappearing!

Culinarian Level 1-15: The early levels

We DO NOT advise using Leves for these low levels. If you really feel like using leves for these tiers:

You can get to CUL 15 in less than an hour if you buy a Company-issued Engineering Scroll. The GC Scrolls can be bought from your GC’s supplier NPC. Culinarian is a bit different. While you “can” complete your early crafting log for fast EXP, we suggest stocking up on important “Ingots” you will need in the future:

Buy the following items:

32x Rocksalt

32x Distilled Water

16x Mineral Water

33x Rye

99x Beehive Chip

49x Maple Sap

132x Sunset Wheat

38x Buffalo Milk

The above Items can be found in the CUL Guild Supplier.

Then Craft these in order (+GC Scroll):

32x Table Salt (Yields almost 2 stacks of Table Salt)

49x Maple Syrup (You’ll be using some for the next step…)

45x Maple Sugar (Made from 15 of the Maple Syrups.. Yields one stack)

33x Rye Flour (Yields 1 stack Rye Flour)

33x Honey (Yields one stack of Honey)

19x Smooth Butter (Yields almost a stack of Smooth Butter)

33x Sunset Wheat Flour (Yields one stack of Sunset Wheat Flour)

16x Pie Dough (Yields nearly one stack of Pie Dough)

It’s up to you on how you want to do this: Quick Synthesis loses a lot of EXP, so you wanna manually craft maybe 5-15 of each item then Quick Synth the rest. The reason for this is to make use of these low level crafts to gain EXP while they’re still relevant. You’ll be using any number of these for as long as you’ll be cooking. Yes, you can buy a few of these from other NPC’s, but might as well maximize the exp now.

With Pie Dough, You might want to craft all of it manually.

While completing the Crafting Log might be “better” in terms of leveling, this is a low-impact, AFK friendly (and inventory space friendly) way. Again, you’ll be using all this stuff anyway.

After completing the shopping list above, activate your scroll and be 15++ quick!

For the Lv 40 Leves, I would definitely reconsider doing the rolanberry cheese leves. You only need two resources, requires only 5 for a turn-in and one of the highest XP at 55,774 (NQ). Pastry fish need six resources, requires 9 pastry fish for a turn-in, and its XP is the lowest at 32,049 (NQ).

For people lazy like me, for levels 45-50. You can buy mulled tea from a vendor in the Kugane markets. I got a stack or 99 for about 25k gil, which was about enough to get from 45-50. Only downside is that this costs more leves.

When the muffin is the collectable it requires 1900 points to qualify. Using HQ Yak Milk starts you at 2040, so it is prime for using a macro to mass produce them while saving leves for other craft skills.

So a quick Question: The 0-15 set only gets me to lv 12. That is with making half of everything by hand then quick synthing the rest. Also lacking the Company-issue Engineering Scroll.

Recommend adding that if you fall short, buying some Tiger Cod off the market (can also be bought in Limsa for 36gil but market for me has always been far cheaper) and making salt cod helps close the gap, can also go for lavender oil and cider if you’re also BTN or if the lavender and apples are cheep on the markets.

The math doesn’t add up for 0-15. You need 130,580 EXP for 0-15. The list calls for the creation of 260 items. That’s just over 500 EXP each as a reward. Half of these will not give 200, even boosted with the CG Scroll (Salt, Syrup, Sugar). You will be to level 5 before finishing the salt.

I did this, exactly as described above, with the CG Scroll. I also completed each of the guild missions when they became available (crafting the additional Grilled Trout and Grilled Dodo…as well as a stack of Olive Oil. Still level 12.

It’s not meant to get you there 100% of the time. RESTED + MANUALS + some good exp on manual crafts should get you up there (I cannot account for RNG). Also, it provides mats that weren’t buyable (I think you can buy table salt now) which you should have a stock of. It’s more of a value move.

For scrips at Lv 58-60, if you’ve got botanist levelled up, and ESPECIALLY if you’ve been muffin spamming and so have way more yakmilk than you started with: Frozen Spirits actually is lower level than Marron Glace, and yields more scrips.

So for the 20-25 tier, you suggest the walnut bread triple turnin. This will give about 15.5k exp nq. However, this also requires 9 walnut breads per turnin, making this option not at all material efficient. I found it best to continue to use the walnut bread courier from the 15-20 tier, as this option onky uses 1 walnut bread for turnin, and still gives 13k exp.

Loce your guides! This is probably the 4th or 5th I’ve used for crafting/gathering. Keep up the good work!

For levels 15-20 the Leve called Rustic Repast in Aleport is by far the best way to go. You can buy the Chicken and Mushrooms from an NPC for 37 gil. The leve gives 12218 exp and 185 gil and is a quick run from the leve giver to the receiver.

ok so from what im noticing, courier leves are the best EXP of any tier, meaning if you were to have someone helping you level rather than doing it alone, would you consider purely sticking to couirer leves as they give the most bang:buck ratio in terms of leves:exp?

For the most part, yes. If cost is not an issue, courier leves are great. One thing courier sucks at? TIME. At level 35 onward, courier leves are slow as hell since they are NOT NEAR ANY AETHERYTE, and can increase “time spent” to level by up to 10 times.

ABSOLUTELY!!!! I was going to comment this, I have been using this guide and I was looking at Pastry fish and I cannot see how that is going to be easy whatsoever. Good guide but I really didn’t have to follow it exactly as I had lvled botany and had kept many things handy with retainer space especially HQ items.

Haven’t made any comparision with the others, but the Gridanian Walnut’s has severely jumped up in price (at least on my server), especially since they long back ago (10/15/2013) removed them from the Shopkeep in Drybone. Is it still the best, and most valid choice to skill up on (lvl 15-20)?

Salt Cod Puffs aren’t as bad as the guide makes it seem, since NQ salt cod can be bought from either the potwatch or independent culinarian npc near each town’s market board for 15g.
Other than that, great guide!

I’m not sure what/when it changed, but the levemete in St. Coinach’s Find for level 45 leves asks for “cups of Rolanberry Lassi” instead of Tomato Pie. The description still sounds like Tomato Pie, but the objective itself states otherwise.

Also! Thank you for the awesome guide =) With it’s help, and 99 leve allowances, I got from 1-50 in about 3 days and a total of ~12 hours.

On my server, I was actually able to MAKE money buying leve items off the market boards and just running leves from 25-50. I literally did not have to craft a single thing during that time and I made ~15,000g profit. Crazy.

Even while using a scroll and manually crafting every single thing I still only made it to the very start of level 12. (Second to last pie made me level) I think they may have changed some stuff around in the latest patches.

Crafting the same item won’t yield the same EXP each time! The more quality you manage to get, the higher exp you will receive! In the case of not reaching 15, you may want to use the Courier leve of your tier, and the “reverse courier”

This is superb, thank you for spending the time to compile and write this up. Very much looking forward to the guides for other trades. Just hope that it’s not too affected by the Leve XP changes in 2.1 (some singles bumped up, triples bumped down?).